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Zynx Health 'Innovation Bash' Brings Abundance of Bright Ideas

By Rochelle Abbott, Hearst Business MediaPublished on 04.16.14

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When Carol Leighton joined Zynx Health last year as vice
president of product management, she saw first-hand what Zynx is famous for—its
entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to offering rigorous care guidance.

“In the health IT world, Zynx has a reputation for having
innovative and creative people,” Leighton says. “Once I joined, I could see
that the employees across the company had a natural talent for ideation. What
we needed was a framework for capturing and vetting these ideas, so that the
right ideas could advance through the Zynx product lifecycle.”

As a first step, in 2013 Zynx formed an Innovation
Council that includes representatives from a variety of perspectives across the
company—marketing, product management, technology, content, clinical
informatics, sales, clinical leadership and project management. The council
implemented a process and format for employees to share ideas and relate them
to market problems. Ideas began to trickle in, and innovation was becoming a
regular part of employees’ work at Zynx. “But we knew there were even more good
ideas out there,” Leighton says. “We were confident that we could flood our
funnel of new product concepts by encouraging employees across the company to
participate.”

To attract this flood of ideas, Leighton’s product
management team and the Zynx Innovation Council announced the Innovation Bash,
a concentrated campaign to elicit ideas, at the Zynx all-company summit in
January 2014. Employees were encouraged to form teams across functional
departments and executives were available as advisors. The incentive? Each
member on the winning team would receive $1,000.

“We are committed to fostering a culture of innovation so
that we can continue to offer the most advanced care guidance across a person’s
health journey,” says Gregory Dorn, MD, who leads Hearst Health as executive
vice president of Hearst Business Media, and who also serves as president of
Zynx Health.

By the deadline in March, 64 ideas had been submitted
with 60 percent of Zynx employees participating. The ideas ranged from enhancements
to existing products to new analytics solutions and patient engagement
solutions. All shared a common vision of “perfect care for all”—the aspiration
of all Zynx solutions. The submissions were reviewed by a panel of judges that
included Dorn, Leighton and Justin Graham, MD, chief innovation officer for
healthcare at Hearst Business Media.

The winning team of four
employees from the clinical informatics, technology and product management
departments developed an idea for a product that would be a joint effort with
fellow Hearst Health company FDB (First Databank).

What’s next for the winning idea? The concept will
undergo market validation and business model validation according to the
rigorous product realization process at Zynx. Employees will be able to track
how this idea and all of the other ideas submitted advance through the product
realization phases on a dashboard at Zynx staff meetings.

“It has been great to see the enthusiasm for innovation
at Zynx,” Leighton says. “This is only our first Innovation Bash, and we look
forward to hosting more. We will continue to take advantage of the talent and
creativity of our staff to offer more solutions that improve the quality,
safety and efficiency of patient care.”